Re: eight-bit char handling in emacs-unicode

[Richard Stallman]

    So you seem to be thinking about a piece of elisp (or maybe C) that will
    call string-make-unibyte, but I'm wondering which piece of code you're
    thinking of, because this piece of code will work if your keyboard uses
    latin-1 encoding, but not if it uses utf-8 encoding.

That may be good enough for some users.

    Also I'm wondering why this piece of code needs to use string-make-unibyte,
    instead of encode-coding-string (the only good reason I can think of is
    that the coding-system to use is not immediately apparent.

One possible reason to use string-make-unibyte is because you want things
to work "as if they'd been converted by something else".  As long as
Emacs performs this conversion in other situations on its own,
it is useful to make it available as a separate function.